Jul 2020 – Present · 5 yrs 10 mos

• Going on a new adventure with my brother
• (JS is for Joe & Stopa, not javascript : })

Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 · 1 yr

• Founded air/land: Airbnb's tool to manage pull requests. Used by ~25% of all engineers week over week.
• Cofounded air/techjobs: Airbnb's tool for team transfers. Significantly increased visibility for available roles.
• Cofounded Awedience: A virtual auditorium, which allowed users to feel presence together and interact during video Q&A. Reached over 80% of the company, and was instrumental for connection during difficult moments, like layoffs during covid.
• Introduced Google Identity-Aware Proxy in our authentication middleware. This involved significant changes on a critical service that wasn't touched for years. Allowed us to remove the VPN requirement from hundreds of internal services. Landed without an error.
• In an effort to encourage bottom-up innovation, created #crazy-ideas: A community of 300 people, which shared ways to make the company better. More than 5 production systems are alive today from ideas in that channel.
• Supported Airbnb's multi-region working group. Identified places where we were adding too much burden on product, and outlined pieces of infrastructure, which would push the complexity down
• Saw that our checkout uptime was suffering. Organized a group across observability, homes, and payments, then created a strategy, alongside scripts, which would let us see and action on root causes week over week. This strategy was adopted across 2 orgs, and led to a 75% reduction in checkout errors over the half.
• Led payments india. Architected and led the introduction of a new processor and gateway for India payments, which would introduce modern payment methods, and remove 2 redirects in our conversion. Involved collaborating with 3 separate orgs, managing a team in India, and orchestrating multi-phased changes across 8+ services.

Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 · 2 yrs

• Patented, pitched, and led the team to create Smart Replies, a tool that helped Page owners automate conversations. Launched at F8 2017.
• Patented, pitched, and led the team to create Built-In NLP. Built-In NLP allows developers on Messenger Platform to instantly leverage Wit.ai’s NLP. Led the launch of Internationalization support for Built-In NLP, and supported it’s extension for F8 2018.
• Led the migration of Wit.ai’s business logic and underlying database from Clojure to Facebook Infra. Laid out a plan of multi-phase deployments, scoping out projects for a team of 5. Instrumented systems to run consistency checks, fixes, and shadow-tests. The migration was completed without downtime.
• Migrated Wit.ai’s Frontend into Facebook, to leverage automatic deployments and Facebook’s Frontend Infra. Created a plugin to convert CoffeeScript to ES2015 JavaScript and JSX. The project was landed without any errors.

Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 · 2 yrs

• Core contributor to the task force that launched BotEngine for Wit.ai. Built the user interface that allowed users to specify conversations that would be used for ML models. Designed, patented and architected branching and quick replies for BotEngine v1
• Architected complex text editing UIs in both Wit.ai and M. This included the AI Composer, which dynamically suggested answers and structured messages in M, and Tagger, which was the tool that users used to tag specific portions of sentences to build NLU models in Wit.
• Designed and implemented WittyFiddle, a UI for deploying Wit.ai apps on the Messenger Platform.
• Led the team that built the console that humans used to train the AI behind M. Architected the system with React.js, Immutable.js, Flux.
• Built the Clojure backend and the frontend for adding quick replies, intent requirements, and peer feedback for trainers.
• Profiled and increased web app performance for a complex React Application. Transitioning between threads decreased from 900ms to 100ms
• Owned and launched support for VOIP, and dynamic emails for M Trainers.
• Launched two UI engineering training courses for React.js and ES2016 in FB Menlo Park and FB NYC.
• Gave the following talks during this time --
• On Scaling React Applications - Applicative (Jun 2016), BrazilJS (Aug 2016)
• Universal Applications - Spotlight React (Mar 2016), FEDay Guangzhou (Mar 2016)
• On Engineering Growth - GGW UChicago (Aug 2016), FEDay Guangzhou (Mar 2016)
• ES2015 - Presentation at Wealthfront (Dec 2015), Presentation at FutureAdvisor (Jan 2016)
• How to React - FB NYC Intensive (Sep 2016)
• React Application Structure - Learn@Facebook (Jun 2016)

Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 · 1 yr · Palo Alto

• Employee #2. Owner of the UI behind Wit.ai
• Migrated an AngularJS architecture to React and Flux
• Built a ClojureScript application to dispatch requests to mechanical turk, for validating voice data
• Built the documentation for Wit, and for Duckling, in a custom framework written in Ruby
• Introduced end-to-end testing into Wit

Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 · 3 yrs

• Founded a startup that helped Dentists get more patients. Built a call-tracking application in Ruby.
• Built the recruitment platform for Atlas China, supporting candidate matching, and video interviews
• Built a custom booking system for Opohills in Taiwan, and for the Whitehouse Hotel in Mongolia